Tracking and monitoring activities during the development of a product are essential to ensuring schedule integrity and timely delivery. As product development has evolved into a process involving multiple partners from different enterprises and operating in different geographic locations and across multiple time zones, the monitoring for the purposes of managing the product life cycle has taken on added complications. Currently, the monitoring of a product life cycle management process such as a collaborative design process is human-centric in nature. A human-centric collaborative design process emphasizes the designer, and the design process as it effects the designer. Thus, such collaborative design process systems are not design data-centric and/or design process-centric. This makes human-centric monitoring extremely difficult to use in a distributed product development environment.
Existing design process management and display is generally performed at a single granularity level. Existing design process management and display in support of a decision support system is not capable of covering an integrated design process at all the granularities across multiple enterprises separated by one or more firewalls in an information network environment such as the Internet or World Wide Web. The latter problem remains true in cross-organizational design and development in a single company.
Generally, predetermined design processes and predetermined contents are what typically get handled by existing collaborative design process systems. Existing systems are not capable of automatically updating and reflecting, in near-real time, the dynamics of design partner's involvements and associated relationships. Such existing collaborative design process monitoring approaches emphasize the process (actions) of a design or the designer-based interface, as opposed to line-of-business needs (e.g., the availability of the bill of materials (BOM), the project schedule, etc.).
Therefore, a need exists for improved product life cycle management techniques.